A Trump Surrogate Drops the Mic: 'There's No Such Thing as Facts'

Is there such a thing as truth? The past 18 months posed this seemingly absurd question. It's not whether something Donald Trump says is true, but about whether anyone even cares. Trump's campaign made a bet that enough voters didn't (or couldn't) tell the difference in a deluge of information, and that bet paid off. Trump won the most important election in decades. His surrogate Scott Nell Hughes explicitly confirmed that whole strategy yesterday.

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Hughes joined The Diane Rehm Show to discuss the media's role in covering the Trump administration. If the campaign and transition are anything to go on, Trump's White House will not overly concern itself with reality. The whole segment is here, but another member of the panel, The Atlantic's James Fallows, flagged one particular moment of the conversation. Around the 14-minute mark, Hughes illustrated a defining principle of Trumpism: There's no longer such thing as fact, because anything is true if enough people believe it.

"Well, I think it's also an idea of an opinion. And that's—on one hand, I hear half the media saying that these are lies. But on the other half, there are many people that go, 'No, it's true.' And so one thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch, is that people that say facts are facts—they're not really facts. Everybody has a way—it's kind of like looking at ratings, or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth, or not truth. There's no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.

"And so Mr. Trump's tweet, amongst a certain crowd—a large part of the population—are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some—amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies and that there are no facts to back it up."

This is an astounding claim.

It's an attack not on Trump's detractors, but on the idea of objective reality. Modern society is built on the idea we can observe things in the world, use the scientific method to verify them and form a consensus that a certain set of things are true. This set of things constitutes the reality in which we live. Hughes, Trump, and his campaign have set out to undermine all of that in order to claim that the truth is anything they want it to be right now—as long as enough of the people who support them believe it.

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(No, this idea did not begin with Trump, but he seems to have perfected it.)

Take a look at the line about Trump's supporters believing there are facts—which are never provided—that prove Trump's claims, whatever they may be. That's as illustrative as it is absolutely horrifying. Hughes' outright embrace of this as a principle of politics and governance is a threat to American democracy.

Politico's Glenn Thrush, another member of the panel, made short work of her most specific claim:

"There are no objective facts? I mean that is an absolutely outrageous assertion. Of course there are. There is no widespread proof that 3 million people voted illegally. it's been checked over and over again. We had a Pew study that took place over 15 years that showed people had more likelihood of being struck by lightning than voting illegally in an election. Facts are facts. I'm sorry you don't like the facts."

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Hughes pushed back on that, citing—after some burbling—a study from political scientists at Old Dominion and George Mason University that claims millions of illegal immigrants voted in recent elections. It was published by Judicial Watch, a rightwing activist group, and has been debunked.

The more pressing point, though, is that Hughes is just explicitly stating the tactics that defined the Trump campaign's messaging. Campaign manager Kellyanne Conway once claimed it didn't matter that Fox News' allegation that Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted wasn't true, because "voters are putting it in this large cauldron of impressions and images and individuals and issues from which they eventually make a choice." She also claimed her boss couldn't have lied about debate moderator Lester Holt being a Democrat because he didn't actually know what Holt's party affiliation was.

If this Catch-22 un-splaining is any indication of how the incoming White House will operate, then the conversation will be about more than any specific claim. It'll be about whether there's still such a thing as truth—and lies—in America.

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